An amateur astronomer found something intriguing in the sky on Christmas Day

Although no three kings were present at the time, amateur astronomer Emmanuel Conseil discovered a "new star" or nova in the Triangulum Galaxy on Christmas Day.

He made the discovery using the online Slooh observatory, whose telescopes are located in the Canary Islands. It was the second time Conseil had discovered a nova this way.

Slooh did a live broadcast of the galaxy and its "new star" on its webpage Tuesday afternoon, and will host a second show next week Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. EST, when scientists will hopefully know what kind of nova it is.

"The object was there on my images on Christmas Day, but not there on the 24th. It's pretty new!" Conseil said in a statement.

iPhone sales could go negative for the first time in history.
iPad sales are shrinking, and show no sign of improving.
The Apple Watch is not the blockbuster people thought it was going to be.
Apple TV is OK, but nothing revolutionary.
Apple's software and services — Apple Music, Maps, Health, Photos — are just OK.
Smart, rational people in the media like Nilay Patel of The Verge, and Ben Thompson of Stratechery, think Apple's products were kinda meh in 2015.

Clinkle, the once-hot payment app that raised $30 million and nearly went bust, is pivoting again

Clinkle, the mysterious payment app that raised $30 million, failed to gain traction, and then lost a chunk of its staff, is pivoting.

TechCrunch's Josh Constine reports that Clinkle is now pivoting away from being a mobile payments and loyalty debit card startup, and it's becoming an SDK (software development kit) called Treats — a referral service.

Other apps can integrate Treats to let users win rewards for referring their friends to the app, Constine reports, citing emails he's reviewed in which Clickle CEO Lucas Duplan has apparently tried to encourage other startup founders to integrate the Treats SDK into their own apps.

When Clinkle finally launched last year, it looked like a prepaid debit card program and was initially only available at select colleges.

T-Mobile and YouTube are fighting over the word 'throttling' — and it has big implications for the future of media

T-Mobile has responded to YouTube's claims that wireless carrier is "throttling" YouTube videos by default, and predictably, T-Mobile objects to YouTube's phrasing.

T-Mobile recently rolled out a binge-friendly program called "BingeOn" that lets many of its customers stream video from popular services like Netflix and HBO without it counting toward their data cap.

But one byproduct of this program is that T-Mobile delivers videos at low-quality 480p resolution by default. This is true even for services that aren't part of the program, according to YouTube, who

Apple asked 11 artists to create art using iPhones and iPads — and the results are stunning (AAPL)

Apple's "Start Something New" campaign aims to show the world how creativity is possible on an iPhone. The company commissioned 11 artists to create artwork using only an iPhone and various third-party apps.

The work ranges from impressionistic to realistic, with a variety of different scenes and inspirations.

Masters rose to fame at JP Morgan, where she pioneered the credit default swap in the nineties. She turned heads in March 2015 when news broke that she was joining Digital Asset Holdings, a startup focusing on the blockchain.

The blockchain is the technology underpinning bitcoin, the dgital currency. It's a decentralised ledger of all transactions on the network, and can be used to transfer value very quickly and cheaply.

While bitcoin is struggling to get any mainstream appeal, buzz is continuing to grow around the blockchain — which financial institutions view as a way to streamline their businesses. Blockchain is "no longer a choice,"